Dear Lizzie: A Letter To My Girlfriend from “The Blacklist”

Hey. I haven’t known you for that long, but I watched you last night fighting with your husband about having a baby, and I feel like we need to talk.

I don’t have a husband or kids, Lizzie, and I’m really happy. To be honest with you, I think you’d be happier if you stopped tormenting yourself about the baby issue. I’ve been watching you, girl. You LIVE FOR YOUR WORK. You totally do. And that’s okay, Lizzie! You’re amazing at catching bad guys! Keep catching bad guys!

I’ve watched you climb an elevator shaft in heels and I just gotta say, a Snuggie is really going to cramp your style. You won’t even have time to blow-dry your huge, Country Western music star hair anymore. For like, the first ten years of your child’s life. Are you sure you can live with that?

Now let’s get real about your baby daddy. It’s time. You know you don’t trust him. Neither do I. Neither does the entire UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Lizzie. I’m talking millions of us. We’re worried about you! Tom says he’s an elementary school teacher but yet he has enough time and energy to make you a totally gourmet dinner and go to an art show opening and flirt with an obviously nefarious female with mean eyes and bad girl lipgloss after a day of work? He’s NOT an elementary school teacher, Lizzie. If he was an elementary school teacher he would be comatose by the television by 8:30 PM with an empty Lean Cuisine container on his chest.

How can you still trust this dude, Lizzie? Maybe it’s because you’re ALWAYS AT WORK DOING WHAT YOU LOVE CHASING SOCIOPATHS and you hardly spend any time with him! No hanging out after work, no grocery shopping together (all that Chinese take-out), no walks with the dog (and I recommend that you two get a dog and see how that goes before adopting a child), no folding laundry together. Who does your laundry, Lizzie? I’ve been wondering.

But I understand, Lizzie, and I sympathize. As a woman who totally loves and lives for her work, I have often made the same mistake about men. Not seeing that they’re shady, lying creeps who are leading double lives, I mean. Don’t feel ashamed. A lot of awesome and brilliant women are really stupid romantically. All I’m saying is, you can’t go having a baby with a man who was recently under FBI investigation. It’s just not wise, you know what I mean? You guys have major trust issues. Also, I could tell you hated being at that baby shower. You can tell me. You hated it. I saw it in your face when you were blindfolded and tasting pureed carrots. You wanted out of there so badly. You were dying to get back to climbing elevator shafts in your high heeled boots. I felt you.

Look, I’m going to say it: you’re not cut out for family life. It’s not that you never make it home on time, it’s that you never make it home at all! You’re obsessed with bringing evil white men to justice (it appears that only white men make the Blacklist, a fact I find somewhat ironic, but aside from a smattering of people of color in your work environment –and in your father figure Red’s personal entourage of people who either protect him or get killed for him– your universe of Criminal Masterminds seems to be 100% snowy white European. I’m more than a little insulted by this, but that’s a conversation we can have another time). You frown all the time. You’re only truly alive when you have a gun in your hand and you’re shouting at Croatian mobsters or serial killers.

Lizzie, Lizzie. You’re never with children! How do you even know that you like them? You have no community of support or social involvement. You never go out to lunch or want to sleep in, and the only incoming calls you get on your cell phone are from the FBI telling you that they found a guy who changes the DNA of his victims in order to fake the deaths of psychopaths who can afford to pay him big money (because we all know that lots of psychopaths have this kind of dough in the bank). My point is, Lizzie, you’re not going to be happy at the park watching a little kid push a toy truck around in the sandbox. You’re going to be really resentful. You’re going to be taking calls from the FBI in the middle of Mommy and Me time because you can’t help it. It’s who you are. I’ve got news for you: motherhood isn’t going to magically provide you with a personality transplant. You can’t expect one little tiny human being to change you that much. If you had a great hub and you guys were solid, I wouldn’t be so worried. But you guys are SO not a team. He can beam his bright blue eyes on you from behind those fake hipster glasses and say otherwise all he wants, but the guy is SHADY, Lizzie. He’s not there for you. And if he’s not there for you and you’re not there for the bambino on your own or with a partner, someone’s going to wind up in life-long therapy, catch my drift?

So talk to your writers, Liz. It’s all in their hands, really. Tell them that the viewers of America are concerned that you’re pushing a plot line that is totally inconsistent to your character’s integrity. Tell them that we know you’re smarter than to not have had the Honest Talk with Tom yet. Tell them that they can go ahead and script that talk and that we will all breath a sigh of relief and move on to the real business at hand of Catching Bad Guys and watching James Spader deliver their hilariously psychopathic dialogue with ultimate comic villainy and panache. Oh, and while you’re at it, Lizzie? Please let your writers know that not only white men are capable of being brilliant, dazzlingly creative sociopaths.

Just a quickie, pigeons. I had two consecutive weeks off in February for vacation time, and when I returned home the church had a snow day, so the person who had prepared to lead the service on February 15 wound up doing that service for February 22. The end result is that I had three […]